Graduate Courses | Fall 2024
PHI 505 History of Aesthetic Theory
John Dewey: Art and Experience
Professor Megan Craig
Wednesday 12:30-3:20 - Stony Brook University
This course entails a close reading of John Dewey’s Art as Experience, in addition to relevant secondary literature and source material for Dewey’s views on art. We will explore aspects of Dewey’s psychology alongside his notion of the developmental nature of experience, the roots of aesthetic experience, the nature of creativity, imagination, and sensation, the relationship between art and nature, the relationship between artist and spectator/audience, and the social/political implications of art (especially as they relate to Dewey’s theory of democracy). No prior knowledge of John Dewey or American Pragmatism is required, although significant philosophical interest and/or past introductory level course work in aesthetics will be assumed. This is a writing intensive seminar.
PHI 506.60 Art and Its Problems
Professor Thomas Brockelman
Monday 11:00 - 1:50 - Brooklyn Commons
Finitude, Experience, and "the Moment”. If a vital ethical imperative of a mortal human life is that it be lived acknowledging the horizon of finitude, what does that imply about the tradition of “presentness” within art? This course will re-evaluate the meaning of “the moment” and “being present” from within existential, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic frameworks.
PHI 509 Special Seminar in Aesthetics
Being and Beauty
Professor Joseph Lemelin
Tuesday 3:30 - 6:20 pm - Brooklyn Commons
Plato infamously quarrels with poetry and the arts, yet he often appeals to beauty in philosophical investigations of the morally good and the metaphysics of Form. What are we to make of this tension, and how do ancient Greek conceptions of beauty differ from modern aesthetic conceptions of beauty? This seminar examines the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry through an inquiry into the centrality of beauty in ancient Greek philosophical thought. In addition to reading dialogues of Plato such as Ion, Symposium, Phaedrus, Hippias Major, and Republic, we will read selections of works by Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Drew Hyland, Anne Carson, David Konstan, and Alexander Nehamas, among others. Class readings and discussions will be complemented by visits to New York-area museums and other related venues.
PHI 600 Ancient Philosophy
Plato: The Socratic Dialogues
Professor Alan Kim
Tuesday 12:30-3:20 - Stony Brook University
This course will explore the dialogues traditionally called the "early" or "Socratic"
dialogues. These are for the most part are marked by an interest in defining virtues;
a form of typically Socratic interrogation, the "elenchus"; an atmosphere of irony;
and aporetic endings. We will focus on theEuthydemus; Greater Alcibiades; Rival Lovers; Charmides; Laches; Republic I; and the Protagoras.
PHI 601 Medieval and/or Renaissance Philosophy
How a Medieval Master (Aquinas) read Aristotle's De anima
Professor Lee Miller
Tuesday 3:30-6:20 - Stony Brook University
Aristotle’s view of the senses and the mind was taken up by Aquinas when he prepared the section of the Summa Theologiae I on human being. Better just than Thomas’ direct commentary on Aristotle’s text, we get to read both Aristotle’s text and how Aquinas worked with it to present his own synthesis. The course will require lots of careful reading and discussion of what the texts say, plus several short papers.
PHI 619 Special Topics in Interface Studies
Philosophy of the Arts and Science
Professor Robert Crease
Monday: 500 - 7:50 - Stony Brook University
Nearly 200 years ago, Whewell coined the term ‘scientist’ by analogy with ‘artist,’ for both referred to people who investigated the world by making things with their hands, synthesizing artisanship and contemplation. This course explores the analogies and disanalogies that have unfolded ever since in these overlapping practices. We will examine turning points when art and science strongly impacted each other: Galileo in the early 17th century, Newton later that century, the discovery of X Rays and the 4th dimension at the end of the 19th, and the discovery of relativity/the quantum at the beginning of the 20th. We will discuss philosophers who compared and contrasted the arts and sciences, including Kant and Heidegger, and themes including objectivity, wonder, representation, performance, and demons.
PHI 630 Seminar in Continental Philosophy
Scheler
Professor Anthony Steinbock
Wednesday 5:00 - 7:50 - Stony Brook University
Influencing currents of thought across an incredibly broad spectrum of fields—philosophy, ethics, sociology, psychology, religion, political thought—Max Scheler was one of the most pioneering thinkers of the 20th Century. Along with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler had one of the greatest impacts on the formation of the phenomenological movement. This course is devoted to a careful study of two of Scheler’s early groundbreaking works, namely, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values and his The Nature of Sympathy. It will be supplemented by essays included in Selected Philosophical Essays and his Ressentiment.
PHI 639 Social and Political Philosophy
Democracy
Professor Anne O’Byrne
Wednesday 2:00 - 4:50 - Stony Brook University
Democracies are remarkable for being founded on nothing other than themselves. They lack a founding principle and, in response, real existing democracies go to great lengths to deny or overcome this essentially anarchic element at their core. This course studies democratic theories that confront this problem from Rousseau’s civil religion to Carl Schmitt’s distinction between them and us, Claude Lefort’s empty place of sovereignty, William Connolly’s identity and difference, Chantal Mouffe’s radical democracy, James Martel’s anarchist prophets, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Nishnaabeg diplomacy.